László Krasznahorkai

From the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize

The Melancholy of Resistance

Natalie

A character-driven parable of order and decay, set in a menacing, foreboding atmosphere that never lets up on its sense of dread. Its rich stream-of-consciousness demands your unwavering attention, filled with details from the mundane of (like the hammering of a nail), to the poignant (the loss of innocence). There’s no mistaking Krasznahorkai’s intelligence and mastery of prose, but this novel isn’t for everyone; it’s a dense, difficult read, but for those that make the commitment, it’ll be worth every run-on sentence.

“Could this, he wondered, be a form of the last judgement? No trumpets, no riders of the apocalypse but mankind swallowed without fuss or ceremony by its own rubbish?”

Anthony Sabourin

The feeling of forgetting why you walked into a room upon entering a room, only the room is strewn with garbage and is on fire.

Gary Homewood

Took me much longer than usual to get through this one. It may well try your patience. It is dense, mostly one paragraph, rambling and repetitive as it picks up the voice of various self absorbed characters. There are vivid, surreal, disturbing, occasionally funny set pieces that will haunt you. I almost gave up. But I persevered, seduced by the hypnotic language. The ending took me by surprise, made it all worthwhile. And the coda of the last few pages is masterful.

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International PrizeThe Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town.A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find - music, cosmology, fascism.The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender centre of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found.Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, 'is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.' And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of Guardian, 'lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds.'

The Melancholy of Resistance

Reviews